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By Root 981 0

fears and insecurities would be a merely sad chapter in modern history. But new threats and demons emerged (such as war and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and Africa, climate change, persistent disease and poverty, and new extremes in corporate greed, Enronstyle). What made the post-cold-war world seem especially sinister, however, was the continued growth of a new kind of technology—information technology—that made Moog synthesizers seem quaint and harmless. The computers, networks, and databases that once may have promised greater efficiencies and global prosperity (at least until Kubrick’s 2001 planted some doubt), that promised to make us fitter, happier, and safer in our homes, in our pretty little gardens, and in our selves, instead seemed to take over and reshape the way the world looks and feels.

Everything Is Not OK, Computer

Worries about the corrosive social and political effects of technology are not new. The rise of television and mass media in the 1950s caused some people to worry that democracy would atrophy if so many were exposed to information presented and controlled by so few. Sociologist C. Wright Mills delineated the tacit partnership of the military, the government, and business corporations in his celebrated book, The Power Elite. Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man argued similarly that magazines, television, and radio promoted a consumerism that suppresses genuine political freedom:

Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living. . . . In the medium of technology, culture, politics, and the economy merge into an omnipresent system which swallows up or represses all alternatives.3

More recently, Noam Chomsky has detailed the “manufacturing” of political consent in America and the West by elites who impose not only facts and figures on the public but that particular feeling, fed by technologically-enabled media, that ordinary citizens are incapable of criticism or dissent:

It is an important feature of the ideological system to impose on people the feeling that they are incompetent to deal with these complex and important issues; they’d better leave it to the captain. One device is to develop a star system, an array of figures who are often media creations or creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control our lives and control international affairs. . . . we poor slobs ought to just watch, not interfere.4

Chomsky’s interest in this feeling takes him a step toward Radiohead (which is perhaps why this passage is quoted inside the Airbag/How Am I Driving? EP). The intellectual who has perhaps come closest, however, is Mills, who grounded his sociological and ideological analyses of modern life in what he called its “tang and feel.” In a lecture from 1954, he asked his audience,

What is the tang and feel of our experience as we examine the world about us today? It is clear that these feelings are shaping the way we ask and the way we answer all the questions of this conference.5

Mills had in mind two particular fears of cold-war life associated with technology and the national press—nuclear annihilation and rampant McCarthyism. But his own description of what it was like to be alive in the early 1950s expresses more broadly the anxiety of anyone who resists Marcuse’s one-dimensional culture of conformity, of one who resists Chomsky’s feeling that dissent implies incompetence, or of one who, like Yorke, worries that he’s going crazy because important and disturbing things that should be said about life simply aren’t. Mills said,

We are often stunned and we are often distracted, and we are bewildered almost all of the time. And the only weapon we have—as individuals and as a scatter of grouplets—is the delicate brain now so perilously balanced in the struggle for public sanity. . . . We feel that we are living in a world